So New York City has a mayor with feet almost as big as his mouth, a fellow who can’t quite figure out how to get to work on time or what to do when he arrives, whose poll numbers have been underwater since roughly two weeks after he took office — and who’s now having a rant at The New York Post.

No false objectivity here: I love the New York Post. I worked for the old gal for so many years that the number scares me just thinking about it.

And I agree that the paper has much for which to answer; name one that doesn’t. But the New York Post hasn’t been under federal, state and local criminal investigation for the past two-plus years, either — which, ahem, is more than can be said of Bill de Blasio.

Which certainly could explain why Hizzoner’s been so testy lately; US Attorney Preet Bharara just dropped the hammer on the Cuomo administration, and maybe the mayor figures he’s next. And for sure it could account for his exasperation with The Post — which regularly hauls out the big type to report on his endless adventures with Bharara, state investigators and the Manhattan district attorney. Plus bums in the streets, chaos in the schools and rip-offs of New York’s sorely pressed taxpayers.

Then again, maybe not. For the mayor, it’s always about the ­ideology.

“I’ve got no use for a right-wing rag,” de Blasio blurted Thursday — explaining his refusal to take questions from The Post’s City Hall bureau chief. Petulance is a mayoral privilege, of course, even if it is an unconventional approach to communicating with the public.

But “right-wing”? That’s pretty rich, coming from a fellow who honeymooned in Havana after spending college summers cutting cane with the comrades in Sandinistaland. Anyone standing a tick to starboard of Bernie Sanders would check the box in this mayor’s tally book.

Why else would he have spent weeks questioning Hillary Clinton’s progressive credentials before finally bestowing his nihil obstat last spring? It was a bewildering miscalculation for which the mayor, and his city, are likely to suffer should the former first lady become president in January.

Clintons have long memories.

Or maybe not so bewildering. Bill de Blasio esteems himself to a degree not remotely commensurate with his accomplishments. He viewed his election as a personal affirmation, and as a rocketship ride to national prominence. But in fact it merely reflected the non-participation ethic that informs New York politics these days.

That is, winning 70 percent of the vote in an election where scarcely 20 percent of the electorate turns out is not a mandate, it is a starting point. A wiser mayor would have understood this, and set about building a base.

De Blasio did nothing of the sort. Quite the opposite.

see also

Right off the bat, he engineered a jailbreak for a storefront bishop from Brooklyn being held on a warrant violation — further alienating one of the most important constituencies any mayor can have, the already profoundly suspicious NYPD. (The bitterness lingers, and no longer will be mitigated by the presence of a brilliant police administrator, Bill Bratton.)

He hired an advocate, not an expert, to run the city’s social services. No surprise that Grand Central Terminal is once again up to its scuppers in vagrants and worse.

He padded the topmost echelon of his administration with fellow Service Employees International Union/1199 alumni. No surprise, then, that 1199 is a vector in at least two de Blasio administration scandals — the Rivington House nursing home deed transfer and the Long Island College Hospital land conversion.

And so it goes. Covering the de Blasio administration is like throwing darts at a wall covered with party balloons: Just about every toss, something’s going to pop.

‘Covering the de Blasio administration is like throwing darts at a wall covered with party balloons: Just about every toss, something’s going to pop.’

There’s the police-corruption scandal; the campaign-donation probe; the not-for-profit solicitation outrage; and just now The Post reports that de Blasio has stocked his personal staff with 264 taxpayer-funded “special advisers” — that is, operatives who shortly will peel off and kick-start his 2017 re-election campaign. Your cost: $18.7 million a year. (How many child-welfare case workers might that buy?)

Now, The Post didn’t discover all of this. But it did its share — and it didn’t stint on the drama along the way. This is very much in a New York newspaper tradition that stretches back to the 1734 criminal libel trial of John Peter Zenger and his New York Weekly Journal — another “rag” that delighted in vexing pompous, sometimes duplicitous politicians.

Zenger beat the rap, of course, establishing the basis for the First Amendment to the US Constitution and setting a precedent that most New York politicians have respected ever since: Newspapers have a right to publish just about anything they damned well please. Even when they are, in Bill de Blasio’s view, an “ideological apparatus” that constitutes “a very negative presence in our city.”

Now, any mayor willing to pack his personal staff with 264 political moles is presumptively an expert on ideological apparatuses. De Blasio deserves that much.

But a “negative presence?” Better men than the mayor have weathered worse; most, like de Blasio, have deserved every word of it. And the Republic has prospered.

So tough noogies, Mr. Mayor. Get over yourself.

Bob McManus is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and former editorial page editor of The Post.